Michael Arrington wants a $200 touchscreen internet tablet. So do a lot of people. Unlike a lot of…
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This is technically the second prototype, but the first doesn't really bear noting—it barely started, didn't yet resemble the planned project and had a bare-metal accidental Steampunk aesthetic. This, well, this looks pretty close to the concept. The machine boots, browses the net, and operates with only a touchscreen and an onscreen keyboard. Behind the screen is a a Via Nano processor, 1GB of RAM and a 4GB flash drive, running a stock Ubuntu install and a custom WebKit browser (Konquerer with bigger buttons?).

The whole thing works pretty well, and I have to give Arrington props for pushing the project along this far. But! There's a catch:

We were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic

and:

The real question for us is whether this project has legs and should go forward towards production units, which is a very big step from a working prototype. That would require spinning the company off from the blog and building a team around Louis. It’s a decision we haven’t made yet.

Yeah, I'd say "are we going to even make this thing?" is a "real question", but even for $300, I kind of hope they do. [TechCrunch]